Quotes About Humanity

We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.

To look at the paper is to raise a seashell to one's ear and to be overwhelmed by the roar of humanity.

At the beginning of human history, as we struggled to light fires and to chisel fallen trees into rudimentary canoes, who could have predicted that long after we had managed to send men to the moon and areoplanes to Australasia, we would still have such trouble knowing how to tolerate ourselves, forgive our loved ones, and apologise for our tantrums?

In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.

How kind we would be if we managed to import even a little of this instinct into adult relationships – if here, too, we could look past the grumpiness and viciousness and recognize the fear, confusion and exhaustion which almost invariably underlie them. This is what it would mean to gaze upon the human race with love. Esther's

He [Wordsworth] invited his readers to abandon their usual perspective and to consider for a time how the world might look through other eyes, to shuttle between the human and the natural perspective. Why might this be interesting, or even inspiring? Perhaps because unhappiness can stem from only having one perspective to play with.

How quickly all the advantages of technological civilisation are wiped out by a domestic squabble. At the beginning of human history, as we struggled to light fires and to chisel fallen trees into rudimentary canoes, who could have predicted that long after we had managed to send men to the moon and aeroplanes to Australasia, we would still have trouble knowing how to tolerate ourselves, forgive our loved ones and apologise for our tantrums?

We study biology, physics, movements of glaciers... Where are the classes on envy, feeling wronged, despair, bitterness...

Our bodies smell, ache, sag, pulse, throb and age. They force us to fart and burp, and to abandon sensible plans in order to lie in bed with people, sweating and letting out intense sounds reminiscent of coyotes calling out to one another across the barren wastes of the American deserts. Our bodies hold our minds hostage to their whims and rhythms.

But is shame really the most useful tool to be employed in the reformation of mankind? Do people grow better through being belittled? Does fear educate?

Without sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable. We might believe we were not ridiculous.

To define a mission for art, then, one of its tasks is to teach us to be good lovers: lovers of rivers and lovers of skies, lovers of motorways and lovers of stones (58). And – very importantly – somewhere along the way, lovers of people.

A person is never good or bad per se, which means that loving or hating them necessarily has at its basis a subjective, and perhaps illusionistic, element.

Applied to the news , having perspective involves an ability to compare an apparently traumatic event in the present with the experiences of humanity across the whole of its history – in order to work out what level of attention and fear it should fairly demand. With perspective in mind, we soon realize that – contrary to what the news suggests – hardly anything is totally novel, few things are truly amazing and very little is absolutely terrible.

Yet we promise not to look around, either, for we accept that there cannot be better options out there. Everyone is always impossible. We are a demented species.

Uma pessoa nunca é boa ou ruim per se, o que significa que amá-las ou odiá-las tem necessariamente em sua base um elemento subjetivo e talvez ilusionista.

How kind we would be if we managed to import even a little of this instinct into adult relationships—if here, too, we could look past the grumpiness and viciousness and recognize the fear, confusion, and exhaustion which almost invariably underlie them. This is what it would mean to gaze upon the human race with love.

We are idiots now, we have been idiots in the past and we will be idiots again in the future - and that is OK.

Romantik dönem boyuncaruhun hisle baÄŸdaÅŸt?r?ld???ndan bahsetmiÅŸtik; ancak ÅŸunu söylemekte yarar var ki çok k?sa bir süre sonra his;zevkleri ya da mutluluklar? deÄŸil de ac?lar? hissetmekle özdeÅŸlerÅŸtirilir oldu.Bir ÅŸeyleri derinden yaÅŸamak; mutlu olmak;duÅŸta ?sl?k çalmak ya da bahçede ÅŸark? söylemek anlam?na gelmiyordu: Ruhu olan insan ac?lara duyarl? insan demekti art?k.

It is the news that introduces us to a far wider range of human beings than we could ever meet in person, and that over time, through the stories it runs and the way it comments on them, forms an idea in our minds about the kind of country we live in.

Being political doesn't only or principally mean caring what party wins the next election; to be political is to care about the happiness of strangers.

It was not by mere coincidence that sex so disturbed us for thousands of years: repressive religious dictates and social taboos grew out of aspects of our nature that cannot now just be wished away.

Human beings sometimes interest me but I don't like them because they are not intelligent enough.

An idealism previously directed at gods and spirits has been rerouted towards human subjects – an ostensibly generous gesture nevertheless freighted with forbidding and brittle consequences, since it is no simple thing for any human being to honour over a lifetime the perfections he or she might have hinted at to an imaginative observer in the street, the office or the adjoining aeroplane seat.